Life is more than a game!

I decided recently to unistall Solitaire and Free Cell from my PC. Despite being a 100% believer that these games exercise the mind and keep it agile, I felt that I had acquired a worrying dependency habit!

So I was naturally attracted to a recent article in The Times dealing with the issue of games addiction. It cited the story of a young man who ultimately was spending 17 hours a day on line playing World of Warcraft. It seems that 12 million play this particular favourite including celebs like Vin Diesel and Mr and Mrs Jonathan Ross.
Apparently it is the opportunity to create an avatar, to join others in guilds and to fight battles that attracts many players. Becoming somebody they cannot be in real life.
Jane McGonigal a game designer addressing a conference in California last month presented this as an opportunity rather than a concern. Suggesting to the audience that the experiences we learn playing games could provide a formula for saving the world. According to Jane and based on her research at the Institute for the Future, games create "super empowered hopeful individuals" with the potential to solve global problems such as famine, disease, and warfare.
She did point out that realising this opportunity would require us to increase our weekly on-line gaming time from 3 billion hours to 21 billion!
Other experts are less enthusiastic. One psychologist recently suggested that games expose us to a world where there is no real consequence for our mistakes. Hilarie Cash, a mental health counsellor in America who runs ReStart, a treatment clinic for internet addiction, believes that game makers deliberately give their products an “addictive quality.”  Many, she says, use the principle of intermittent reinforcement — “you have to be rewarded often enough to stay engaged but not so predictably that you get bored”  And there was me thinking I was getting better when I reached level 2 in Bejewelled!!

 

I have also done some research, with my own "super empowered hopeful individuals"....my grand-sons. My main observations are:

1. It is totally impossible for me to keep a high speed car on a race track;
2. I have considerably more success at 10 pin bowling if I just swing my arm at the screen and leave the swerve button alone;
3. Choosing to be Brazil when playing FIFA 2010 has absolutely no effect on my football skills;
4. Saying I did something well will provoke considerable laughter;
5. I am always learning something about the controls that they hadn't previously mentioned !!! 

Will being sneaky and laughing at the less able really help save the world Jane?